Big 12 commissioner says “change is coming” in college sports

That was the theme of Monday’s state of the conference speech by Big 12 Conference commissioner Bob Bowlsby on the first day of Big 12 Football Media Days.

“If you like what you see in intercollegiate athletics right now, you’re going to be disappointed when the change comes, because it’s coming,” Bowlsby said. “The scholarships are going to change. The relationship between student-athletes and their universities are going to change.

“I think that we are going to have to do the best job we can to retain the best elements of what we currently have and recognize that maintenance of the status quo is not in the cards. There is change afoot and some of it is going to be unhappy change because I think it will ultimately reduce the number of opportunities for young people to go to college and participate in sports.”

The changes Bowlsby is speaking of sparks from the lawsuits being brought by former athletes, which the Big 12 is included as defendants in seven suits and Bowlsby foresees that number to grow.

“I think all of that in the end will cause programs to be eliminated. I think you’ll see men’s Olympic sports go away as a result of the new funding challenges that are coming down the (pipe),” Bowlsby said. “I think there may be tension among and between sports on campus and institutions that have different resources.

“I really do believe that it will be very difficult to run the kind of breadth of program that hundreds of thousands of student-athletes currently enjoy if we begin diverting significant amounts of money to other purposes.”

Bowlsby said the conference is working to make a change to the NCAA bylaws in regard to conference football championship games — which can only be held by conferences with two divisions of at least six teams each.

“Ourselves and the ACC have advocated for that rule to be deregulated, just so that we could have some prerogatives,” the conference commissioner said. “In our case, we would like the prerogative to, at some point in time, have that discussion and make a decision as to whether or not we might want to take our two highest ranked schools in the poll and have them play each other at the end of the year.”

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